It will be on the same day, then, to intercept Macbeth as homeward his ambitious mood hurries. The battle, which the rebels against Duncan's rule have just lost, Macbeth has won. What else has he won? His thoughts, out-travelling his body's utmost speed, will change into witches by the way and inform him. Hitherto his fateful Self has remained vague and disembodied. Now it will meet itself, and hear it utter a threefold "Hail!" For thus I conceive that when Macbeth's crime had fully infected Shakspeare's imagination, and was urging it into the appalling swiftness of the first scenes of this tragedy, he endowed Macbeth with its own shaping quality. The witches were not decoys of another world to lure him into acquaintanceship with crime. They were his own intention grown to be so ravenous that it framed a prelude to his deed, as the condition of starving sets a phantom banquet before a person's eyes. Shakspeare had no need of them to start the business of his play or to keep alive his plot. Macbeth and his wife did their own tempting so thoroughly that spirits might applaud and refrain from interfering. But these witches were characters of the second-sight which Shakspeare imputed to Macbeth, a distinguishing trait born into Macbeth's mind from the conception of this tragedy. The prosaic supernature of the old chronicle, on which the play is based, is transformed into a psychological peculiarity. So we observe that these weird sisters were no posters of vulgar ill, horsed on nursery broomsticks, to deliver murrain in the fold and rheumatism at the hearth, in gratification of a vicious whim. But they became vulgarized into this whenever Macbeth was absent from the scene. Then they shrank from Fates to hags, such as Banquo's undistempered eyes saw them, withered, hairy-faced, laying chappy fingers upon skinny lips,--old women dreaded by the common people for reputed powers of bewitching. All such Celtic superstitions breed nobly in Macbeth's fancy: he knows all about the village gossip. The eldritch women are the nearest hint of supernature which he had; but his kingly anticipations tolerate no common pranks from them. When Macbeth is absent, Shakspeare shows what stale witcheries they traffic in. The critics blame the incongruity, or attribute it to some interpolating pen. But Shakspeare rightly intended to place in contrast with Macbeth's fantasy the popular material of his age in which it worked. So we hear the witches relating their trumpery exploits. This one has been killing poor people's swine. Another threatens to water-log a shipmaster because his wife refused to give her chestnuts. They put their spiteful heads together, and gloat over a drowned pilot's thumb. When Macbeth enters, this ghastly twaddle is hushed by a domineering thought which meets in these crones his "all-hail hereafter."